B Corp and 1% for the Planet member Faherty is taking one more stride in their sustainable journey by incorporating Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) cotton into one of their most popular designs, the Sunwashed tee, of which they reportedly sold more than 100,000 units last year.
The Sunwashed Tee is made not only with ROC cotton, but also in partnership with model-turned-fashion activist Arizona Muse and her charity, Dirt, which has been advocating for more regenerative and eco-friendly sourcing in fashion supply chains. In addition to opting for ROC cotton, the tees are produced with a lower impact Ozone Wash process.
“You can change a whole business and you can make a whole business have a positive impact and that’s what Faherty has done and continues to do,” says Muse. “For example, they already have all their cotton sourced from organic farms and now they’re going the extra step and sourcing from regenerative farms, which have an even more positive impact on the earth than an organic certified farm.”
While the brand has historically tried to opt for organic cotton and more eco-friendly materials, Mike Faherty, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, said that on a recent trip to Peru, they met with Cotton Nation, a producer of regenerative cotton working with over 2,500 farming families and that inspired him to commit to ROC.
“Faherty was always using organic from the beginning, as much as 75% of our products had organic cotton. But I was on a work trip to Lima where I met with some of the mills and factories we work with and one of the factory owners, Michael, told me about this project. The next day, we were on a plane and then a nine hour drive to see the farms,” says Faherty.
The San Martín region in Peru, where Cotton Nation, operates, was once a supplier of native cotton to the automative industry, says Lisa Diegel, Chief Sustainability Officer of Faherty. But demand for their cotton took a nose dive in the ’90s when car manufacturers opted for synthetic fibers to fill car seats. As a result, cotton farmers had to pivot to corn and rice – crops that were more polluting for the local environment, she explains.
About five years ago, Cotton Nation helped the farmers revive cotton farming — and secure new customers, such as Faherty, to buy their cotton. And this time around they opted for a regenerative and organic model. This meant no synthetic chemicals, no GMO seeds, helping recover forests through reforestation programs, developing conservation buffers, using rainwater only for irrigation, intercropping, cover cropping and ensuring that farmers were getting a fair price. Plus, they added a technology to trace the fibers from field to garment — so consumers and brands like Faherty could see precisely where the fibers were coming from.
After five years of putting these practices to the test, Cotton Nation reported that they did see improvement in the soil. First, soil compaction decreased, meaning the soil became more aerated (and this would allow for healthier root growth). Before, when doing soil tests, they couldn’t even get the probe to go more than 20 centimeters (or 7.5 inches) deep. Secondly, the soil kept its structure. After 5 minutes in water, they saw that 80% of the soil structure remained. That meant less run off and erosion.
“These changes indicate an improvement in soil health, allowing for better root growth and soil soil microbiota development, as well as improved water utilization,” says Diegel.
For Muse, who was featured in the digital campaign with the Sunwashed tees and a short documentary produced by Faherty on this particular supply chain, this topic of soil is exactly what inspired her to start her nonprofit Dirt over three years ago.
“The mission is soil regeneration as a climate solution,” she says. “We work at the intersection of fashion and agriculture because there is a strong intersection between fashion and agriculture, which isn’t the most obvious to everyone because we don’t wake up every day and as we get dressed say, ‘Thank you farmers for making my clothes for me. Thank you for growing my fibers.’ The way when we sit down to eat, we’re quite aware that the food came from the Earth. I want everyone to start to have the same equal awareness for the fact that our clothes from soil.”
Mike Faherty says that many of the new their new cuts will use ROC cotton; it’s not just a one-off collaboration. “The farmers love it because they have the confidence in it that they’ll be paid a premium price and there is definitely a customer for their crop.”
In addition, the brand is also experimenting with more eco-friendly ways to get the sunwashed effect. Mike describes the equipment used for Ozone Wash as a “big washing machine that operates with light instead of water. So it can naturally pull color out without contaminating the color.” Only one such machine exists in Peru, he says. And another in India. While it’s not a commonly used process, he prefers it because it gives the slightly faded effect without resorting to using lots of water, even though it is pricier.
Muse who has been in fashion for over a decade notes that she’s impressed, and inspired, by brands such as Faherty but overall wants consumers to better understand the fashion landscape.
“After having spent 14 years in the industry, we are a mess. Still, when it comes to sustainability, there are many players who are working really hard and doing great transformational work in sustainability. But the reality is we still need more stringent guidelines and we need them to come from governments as well as needing them to come from the brands and as well as needing certifiers to get more involved with the fiber side. For the simple reason that of all the agricultural land on this planet, half of it is not growing food. Half of it is growing fibers. Of course we need to focus on fibers.”
Thus, it’s not enough to stop at the mill — but to go all the way to the farm, and see if a plant such as cotton can actually help regenerate soils. Faherty would argue that it can.
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